The increased popularity and widespread use of mobile applications has created many challenges to the provisioning and delivery of wireless communication services. While mechanisms are in place to control access to the finite resources of most wireless networks, the relative unfamiliarity of most users with the impact of applications on network performance and service costs may lead to degraded service levels and unforeseen billing charges.
For example, it is common for a user to launch an application on a mobile phone, only to have that application run in the background nearly perpetually. The application may not only require network resources to operate—such as wireless bandwidth between the mobile phone and a base station—but it may also over use resources of the phone itself, such as battery life. Multiplied many times over across many phones, network performance in a wide area can degrade, leading to customer complaints and dissatisfaction.
In the past, a wide variety of pricing plans have been used to control access to network resources. But with the wide variety of applications available pre-installed on modern phones and available via applications stores online, it is difficult for a user to understand the potential impact of any particular application on both the performance of the network and the performance of his own phone. This is made even more difficult by the fact that network conditions vary, and thus so will the impact of an application. In addition, the performance of the application itself may degrade based on network conditions at any given time.
Regardless of performance issues, it is also difficult for a user to understand the cost implications of running an application. For instance, in a case where a user subscribes to a pricing plan that discourages data usage during peak periods, the user may not be aware of the relative data-intensity of a given application relative to any others. This can lead to unexpected charges for exceeding data limits, and ultimately to dissatisfied customers.